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42
IT’S A TIDAL WAVE OF JOY !
The amazing duo The War & Treaty are now resident in Nashville and set to win hearts around world.
42
43
By Brian Wise
Photographs by Michael Mackenzie.
It’s New Orleans Jazz Fest 2018 and the
audience is standing and hollering while
a group fronted by two African-American
singers with stunningly powerful voices are
entreating everyone to go down to the river
and get baptised. They sing songs of love,
peace and understanding but go by the
intriguing name of the The War & Treaty.
By the end of the show everyone is on their
feet screaming with enthusiasm while the
singers stand in tears, overcome with the
emotion of the performance and the
response. To tell the truth, there are more
than a few audience members crying too.
Then comes a rarity at Jazz Fest – the duo
and their band are allowed an encore.
But this is not the gospel tent crammed with
people getting into the spirit of things. This
is the Lagniappe stage, the festival’s smallest
performance stage, located in the grandstand
where people watch on while eating freshly
shucked oysters and drinking beer.
It is Sunday May 6. Mark that date down
because that is probably the last time we will
see this duo on a stage this small at any
festival anywhere.
I missed them two weekends earlier in Austin
at the Old Settler’s Festival when a drenching
forced us to retreat like drowned rats to the
safety of our hotel but a brief glimpse at last
year’s Americana Festival in Nashville was
enough to get me to the Lagniappe stage,
along with my son, his girlfriend and anyone
else who would listen.
What a way to finish JazzFest. Back at the
hotel everyone who was there is excitedly
discussing the show, certain that they had
seen something very special
Five days later, I am near a little hamlet just
outside Nashville with my friend Michael
Mackenzie (who took the photographs)
talking to Michael Trotter and Tanya Blount
Trotter. It just so happens that we had
already planned to fly home from Nashville
after seeing the Stones;' Exhibitionism.
On that previous Sunday afternoon, we had
also made up our minds that we had to talk
to Michael and Tanya.
Theirs is an incredible story and afterwards,
Mackenzie and I must admit to tearing up (in
a very manly way) while they told their
stories.
......................................................................
You might have already seen Tanya Trotter
in the movie Sister Act 2 where she performed
a song with Lauryn Hill. You might have
noticed that she had a career in musical
theatre and also have heard her 1994 album
Natural Thing or heard her singing on the
soundtrack of The Family That Preys. You
could have even bought her book Through
The Rain: 40 Principles To Surviving Life’s
Challenges.
Ironically, Michael Trotter found his talent
blossoming on a completely different stage:
in Baghdad’s war torn ruins.
After a childhood in Cleveland, Michael and
his mother moved to Washington DC, where
in 2003, after a hard life living from hand to
mouth, Michael enlisted in the army at the
age of just 19, not realising that there was a
war on! Sent to Baghdad, one day he found
himself in one of Saddam Hussein’s bombed
out palaces and discovered a piano in the
basement. When his Captain heard, him play
and sing he encouraged Michael to pursue
music.
Michael would write songs to be performed
at memorial services for his fallen comrades.
“I started singing at age three,” says Michael.
“But I didn’t start songwriting and doing
music until military days. I joined the army
and I was terrified because, we went to war.
But, one of my superiors explained to me
that in the palace that we had taken over,
Saddam himself had a piano down there, this
upright, black piano.
"It felt like I was seeing a movie because, as
they’re leading me to it, we have to crawl
over things, I guess some of the happenings
from our bombs and stuff like that. So,
you’re picking up brick and mortar and
you’re crawling and climbing through. I’m
like, Man, where in the world are we going?
Then it’s like this ‘ah-ha’ moment. There’s
this piano in the corner - and that piano
would save my life. Literally. It would pull
me off the front lines, it would steal me away.
I started writing songs about the fallen.”
“The guy that showed me where the piano is,”
he continues, “and the guy that encouraged
me to keep going and songwriting and playing
on the piano, he gets killed. A song came out
of it and I asked to perform that song at a
little makeshift memorial service we were
going have out there. Long story short, I did it
and from that moment forward, the
commanders together decided that that is
what my job would be. I would perform songs
that I’ve written, about our fallen, in front of
those troops and it would raise the morale.
That is where my start began.”
When he returned to the USA, Trotter
met Tanya by chance when they were both
booked at a small festival that she was helping
to run in Maryland.
“I just couldn’t believe my ears when I heard
what he was doing," explains Tanya. “I ran up
to him and I’m like, ‘Did you write all this
music that you just performed?’, and he was
like, ‘Yes, I did’. So, we exchanged numbers, I
think I bought like six CDs and I was running
all around the festival and giving them out to
people because I just wanted everybody to
hear him.”
Tanya was recording with her brother at the
time and Michael taped some songs for them,
hoping they would record them. Tanya
explains that a friend heard his vocals and said
to her, “Did you guys hear that? You all need
to be doing this together, do the singing
together. And that’s how The War and Treaty
started.” They soon married and now have a
six-year-old son and a new career.
Last year, Michael and Tanya released the
7-track EP, Down To The River – a bracing
mix of folk, gospel, soul, R&B and funk -
which gave a hint of what they could do. It’s
the sort of music that has unexpected effects
on the audience.
“I know a guy, out in Pennsylvania,” explains
Michael. “The guy walked up to us afterwards
and he had on a Donald Trump hat, and he
was very emotional. He came up to me and he
said, ‘Young man, you are a thief, you are a
robber!’ And I looked at him, I said, ‘Really?’
And I was ready to talk with him. It didn’t
make me upset or anything, it was like, I want
to know why. He says, ‘I call you a thief
because, you stole my hate. I can’t find it in
my heart’ and he burst into tears.
>>>
IT’S A TIDAL WAVE OF JOY !
“He came up to me
and he said,
‘Young man, you are a thief,
you are a robber!......I call you
a thief because,
you stole my hate.
I can’t find it in my heart’
and he burst into tears.”
– Michael Trotter.
The amazing duo The War & Treaty are now resident in Nashville and set to win hearts around world.
“He came up to me
and he said,
‘Young man, you are a thief,
you are a robber!......I call you
a thief because,
you stole my hate.
I can’t find it in my heart’
and he burst into tears.”
– Michael Trotter.